


Love Is Blindness

by sharkduck



Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: 3DNPCs, Angst, F/M, Interesting NPCs Mod, Rumarin Is A Thalmor, anyways kris takahashi please answer my emails, betrayal fic, no beta reading we die like men, okay this is self-indulgent but what's new!!!!, yeah the fic title is from a U2 song. what about it.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-05 18:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20277880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkduck/pseuds/sharkduck
Summary: What's love but a willing weakness?And maybe weakness isn't so bad.





	Love Is Blindness

“You son of a bitch,” her voice cracks in her throat, and Rumarin’s face doesn’t change, and that _pisses her off._ The way he stands there impassively, at the other end of the room. She could disintegrate him with a shout, and he knows that. Of course he knows. He knows a lot of things about her. They’re married, they’ve been together for years before that, how could he not know.

And yet. And _yet,_ he still stands there, hands folded placidly behind his back, rigid like he knows she wants to shove a broom handle up his ass and use him as a scarecrow.

Isildur is angry. And beyond being angry, she’s – heartbroken. Her chest hurts. Worse than anything she’s ever felt, worse than being stabbed or bludgeoned or burned; it comes from the inside, the awful, violent wrenching of her heart as it’s being torn in two. She loves him. And he does _this._

He waits until she stops struggling to cross the room, the two of them alone because he demanded it. Ordered it. How far up as he been on the chain of Thalmor command, this entire time?

He brushes her bangs out of her eyes, a tender, familiar motion just for them, just between them; memories of times long before this, when she’d feel his hand brush over her forehead, see him smile. There’s no smile now. Just cool, calculated impassivity. Lamplight flickering ominously against his skin and turning it from gold to sickly green. The shadows too long under his cheekbones. Clean-shaven, no make-up, and everything about it is wrong in all sorts of ways.

She grits her teeth and forces her lip to curl, growling. The beastblood may have been burned out of her veins, but it left its mark.

“Don’t touch me,” she snaps. “Do not _fucking _touch me. You don’t have the right.” He pauses. And then his hand falls away, back behind him, like he doesn’t want her to see; ashamed, maybe. _Good._

“I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out before this. I thought I was being too obvious.”

“_Fuck you. _Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” She thrashes, and for a brief moment she thinks the restraints are going to give way, but they don’t. Maybe if she had more time and more stamina. “How dare you.” The question comes out before she can stop it, full of venom.

“Did you ever actually love me, or was it a fucking act?”

Rumarin flinches like he’s been slapped – and she feels bad. She does. Because that’s her husband, her partner in crime, and she loves him. It’s gone the next second, and he stands straighter. Stares at her harder. Compensating with harshness, maybe, but she’s not exactly in the position to decipher his moods when everything she’s known about him has been thrown to the wind. Ripped up like so many dry leaves and tossed on a fire.

“Maybe,” he says, his voice distant, there’s none of the usual playful Rumarin there and it makes her sick. “Maybe not. Does it matter now?” She can feel her lip tremble, and she shoves it down, the urge to cry – swallows it, turns it to fuel.

“It _always_ mattered, you bastard!”

He opens his mouth to say something, pauses. Closes it. Then he turns on his heel and starts for the door, and it’s all Isildur can do not to shout him through it and into the hallway. She couldn’t do that to him. He’d die.

So she watches his retreating back with contempt and heartbreak and a million other things, the door closing and leaving her here. Alone. Leaving her.

Her eyes sting with unshed tears, and she swallows those back too.

* * *

Hours later and the next person who comes into her – room? Cell? There aren’t any bars. Just a heavy locked door and a torture rack she’s strapped to, a single lantern lighting the room, casting dark shadows and making her head swim. Probably on purpose. These people knew how to break a mind, she could give them that – but she wouldn’t be their next victim. Not now not ever. _Especially _not now.

The next person who comes into her room is a young-looking Thalmor soldier, followed by a not-quite-so-young-looking Thalmor Justiciar. There’s a palpable tension, and a cloth rag held in someone’s hand, and Isildur knows exactly what they are here for.

No. No way. Absolutely not.

She barely catches a glimpse of them before she s shouts them into the wall, the thundering boom masking the sound of bones crunching underneath pressure, the flickering torchlight hiding the streak of red flowing down from a splatter on the cobblestones, like a flare sent up from the slumped ragdoll corpse of the soldier; she feels no remorse. The Justiciar is in the middle of getting his bearings back, blood running into his eyes from the cut in his forehead when she shouts again. He stares at her with that glazed-over look to his eyes that made Isildur shudder every time. Bend Will is arguably her least favorite shout, if only because it forces her to confront her own actions.

“Unlock my restraints,” she says, voice rumbling with thunder. He does.

The manacles fall open with the click of a key and the heavy sort of thunk common to well-used machinery. She rubs her wrists, raw from struggling, and gets up from the table with a bit of a wobble.

“Give me your dagger.” He does. Her blood boils, her fingers twitch. The heft of a blade in her palm is comforting – it means protection and a means to an end.

Is it cruel to kill him? Maybe. And maybe her cruelty is ingrained at this point. An unshakable habit.

The dagger slides through cloth and flesh like butter. He doesn’t make a sound, besides the heavy thud he makes when she leaves him on the floor to bleed out, the light leaving his eyes just as it comes back, his will his own only to see Isildur’s retreating back as she sends him to Oblivion. She carves through the rest of the fort, a whirlwind. Timbers rattle, dust falls, people fall. But not people anymore – just little red dots on a map on her way to the real battle.

She knows exactly where he is.

Rumarin is alone in a small, but neat office when Isildur busts through, the door coming off its hinges with a clap of thunder. He doesn’t look up. Can’t look up, to see her covered in blood and soot, her hair in a flurry of red strands loose from the usual ponytail, her eyes like silver fire. Can’t face that he did that.

“Rumarin,” she hisses; he knows that voice. She uses it when she’s mad at him for replacing their water with wine, or scaring the kids with stories of boogeymen.

He turns from his desk, steeling himself, his face stony but he can’t help the way his breath catches.

She’s crying.

He’s _never_ seen her cry.

He wants to reach out and brush the tears away, but that’s impossible. His hand feels impossibly heavy, full of concrete as he just barely manages to summon a sword, clenching his teeth until they hurt when she tenses and readies her own stolen dagger.

“I suppose I expected this to happen,” he says.

“Fuck you,” she spits, a sob hitching in her throat. “You’re such a bastard. And I don’t care – you are coming home right now, and we’re going to _talk _about this, damn it.”

“What is there to talk about?” He tries not to focus on the _home _part, on how, even after all of this, she wants to talk – to break up, maybe, but talking is talking and neither of them are good at it, so that speaks to her own feelings. “You’re a threat to the Dominion – basically a demi-god. I can’t let you roam Skyrim in good conscience.”

“Shut up!” The walls rumble, throwing her knife down in disgust, hand and blade covered in blood. “I love you, you ass! _I love you!_” She sucks in sob, clutching the fabric of her shirt as if her heart hurts – Rumarin knows his does, seeing her torn at the seams like this. She looks so small. Sounds small, when she opens her mouth again, looking lost.

“What am I going to tell our kids?”

That breaks him. Little Sofie and Lucia, asking where Pa went. The family. _His _family.

He bites his lip and can’t concentrate enough to hold onto the sword, and it disappears into Oblivion. Rumarin slumps against his desk, his head in his hands. Accepting death.

It doesn’t come. Instead, Isildur makes her way across the floor and presses her forehead against his chest, face buried there as she shakes. He swallows the lump in his throat. His arms wrap around her, pull her close, tilting his head back because his eyes are stinging and he was always taught to not be weak.

But what's love but a willing weakness?

He buries his nose in Isildur’s hair and plants a kiss on the top of her head, anchored by her hand clutching desperately at his robes.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, voice broken, and her only response is to sniff.

Maybe this kind of weakness isn’t so bad.


End file.
